Effect of attention control on sustained attention during induced anxiety

Anxiety has wide-reaching and complex effects on cognitive performance. Although it can intrude on cognition and interfere with performance, it can also facilitate information processing and behavioural responses. In a previous study, we showed that anxiety induced by threat of shock facilitates performance on the Sustained Attention to Response Task, a vigilance test, which probes response inhibition to infrequent nogo stimuli. The present study sought to identify factors that may have contributed to such improved performance, including on- and off-task thinking (assessed with thought probes) and individual differences in attention control, as measured with the Attention Control Scale. Replicating our prior finding, we showed that shock threat significantly reduced errors of commission on the nogo trials. However, we extended this finding in demonstrating that this effect was driven by subjects with low attention control. We therefore confirm that anxiety increases inhibitory control of prepotent responses—a mechanism which is adaptive under threat—and show that this effect is greater in those who rely more upon such prepotent responding, i.e., those with low attentional control.     

Assessing Baselines for Identifying Harm: Tricky Cases and Childhood

Baselines are commonly used to enable harm identification. The temporal, the counterfactual and the duty-based normative baselines are the most prominent. Each of these captures an aspect of common conceptions of what it is to harm and be harmed. However, each baseline also fails to deliver workable identifications of harm when presented with certain types of case. Problematic cases are found readily in childhood, a venue in which harm identification is often called for. Without a reliable means of identifying harm in childhood, harm cannot properly play a central role in normative assessments of parental practices and state intervention. This paper presents childhood cases in which the prominent baselines fail and offers an alternative: the interest-based normative baseline. Should the interest-based normative baseline replace its rivals and reign supreme? I argue not, presenting a case for maintaining a suite of baselines for use in varying contexts.     

Reinforcing the prospective remembering of children with autism spectrum disorder

Prospective memory is remembering to carry out a behavior on a particular occasion or at a specific time in the future. This form of remembering is critical for the daily functioning of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their functional independence from caregivers. We used a single-subject design to investigate whether reinforcement increased the accuracy of prospective remembering in the context of a computerized board game, Virtual Week, of four 6- to 7-year-old children diagnosed with ASD. Reinforcement increased accuracy for all participants compared to baseline performance and effects were maintained after reinforcement was discontinued for three of four children. This is the first study of which we are aware to use a reinforcement-based behavioral intervention to improve the prospective remembering of children with ASD. Limitations and areas for future research are discussed.     

La relation entre les conflits conjugaux,la satisfaction conjugale des mères et la qualité de la communication mère‐adolescente

A sample comprising 41 couples and their adolescent daughters participated in a study on the association between marital conflicts and mother‐daughter communication. Observational measurements and questionnaires were used to evaluate the level of the quality of communication between the couple, the marital satisfaction of the parents and the quality of the communication between mother and adolescent daughters. The results show that: (a) conflicts observed between the parents are positively associated with the level of confrontation observed between the mother and the daughter and (b) the marital satisfaction of the mothers plays a mediatory role between the conflicts in the couple and the level of mother‐daughter confrontation. The marital satisfaction of the mothers would be the link in the process of propagation of the affects and the negative behaviour of the couple and the mother‐adolescent daughter relationship.     

Working mothers versus homemakers: Do dreams reflect the changing roles of women?

In order to examine potential psychological changes arising from women's new social roles, 15 working and 15 nonworking mothers were asked to report dreams collected within a period of three weeks. In addition, they were administered the Jackson Research Personality Form. Two dreams from each subject were analyzed with selected scales which previous studies had shown to be sensitive to sex differences. On the personality inventory, working mothers were found to have higher social recognition and achievement motives. On the dream content measures, discriminant analyses showed that the two groups could be statistically differentiated on the basis of several scales. In accordance with the notion of continuity between waking and dreaming, working mothers experienced more unpleasant emotions, more male characters, and less residential dreams settings than homemakers. The latter group, surprisingly, had more overt hostility in its dreams. These results suggest that as the trend toward carrying the dual role of wage earner and homemaker is expanding, the gender differences typically observed in dreams content may decrease. They also suggest that the analysis of dream content may prove useful to study the strategies of women adapting to role changes.     

Lateralization in haptic processing: An apparatus for analyzing manual strategies

We describe an apparatus for testing laterality in haptic processing in the discrimination of nonsense shapes in humans or monkeys. The system, which permits either mono- or dichhaptic discrimination, automatically provides data on the measurement of accuracy along with information on hand exploratory strategies.     

The after-effects of ventriloquism

Subjects were tested for both ear-hand and eye-hand co-ordination before and after monitoring a synchronous series of noise bursts and of light flashes coming from the same spatial position, but with the virtual position of the flashes displaced 15° laterally by prisms. Attention was forced on both stimuli by the instruction to detect occasional reductions in intensity. No subject reported noticing the spatial discrepancy. Nevertheless ear--hand co-ordination was shifted in the direction of the prismatic displacement, and eye-hand co-ordination in the opposite direction. Both shifts were observed with instructions suggesting that the sound and the light came from one single source, with instructions suggesting two separate sources, and also with no information regarding the spatial relationship of sound and light. It is concluded that the resolution of auditory-visual spatial conflict involves recalibrations of both visual and auditory data and that these alterations last long enough to be detected as after-effects.     

Ventriloquism,sensory interaction,and response bias: Remarks on the paper by Choe,Welch, Gilford,and Juola

The arguments on which Choe, Welch, Gilford, and Juola have based their thesis that the various manifestations of ventriloquism are postperceptual effects are critically examined. The application of detection theory to the results of a discrepancy detection experiment, which they claimed allowed them to separate sensory interaction from response bias, is found invalid. It is further argued that an interpretation of ventriloquism exclusively in terms of response processes cannot account (1) for the compelling quality of the effect, and (2) for the occurrence of aftereffects.     

Adaptation to auditory-visual discordance and ventriloquism in semirealistic situations

While “recalibration by pairing” is now generally held to be the main process responsible for adaptation to intermodal discordance, the conditions under which pairing of heteromodal data occur in spite of a discordance have not been studied systematically. The question has been explored in the case of auditory-visual discordance. Subjects pointed at auditory targets before and after exposure to auditory and visual data from sources 20° apart in azimuth, in conditions varying by (a) the degree of realism of the context, and (b) the synchronization be-tween auditory and visual data. In Experiment 1, the exposure conditions combined the sound of a percussion instrument (bongos) with either the image on a video monitor of the hands of the player (semirealistic situation) or diffuse light modulated by the sound (nonrealistic situation). Experiment 2 featured a voice and either the image of the face of the speaker or light modulated by the voice, and in both situations either sound and image were exactly syn-chronous or the sound was made to lag by 0.35 sec. Desynchronization was found to reduce adaptation significantly, while degree of realism failed to produce an effect. Answers to a question asked at the end of the testing regarding the location of the sound source suggested that the apparent fusion of the auditory and visual data—the phenomenon called “ventriloquism”— was not affected by the conditions in the same way as adaptation. In Experiment 3, subjects were exposed to the experimental conditions of Experiment 2 and were asked to report their impressions of fusion by pressing a key. The results contribute to the suggestion that pairing of registered auditory and visual locations, the hypothetical process at the basis of recalibration, may be a different phenomenon from conscious fusion.     

Expressing Coreference in French: Cognitive Constraints and Development of Narrative Skills

This study looks at how coreference is expressed under various oral production conditions and at various stages of development. Seven- to 11-year-old children and adults told silent comic strip stories involving two characters to a same-age peer. The stories varied as to: (1) the frame presentation mode, (2) the links between events across frames, and (3) thematic continuity. The results showed that, (1) in general, all speakers marked increasing referent givenness (the 7-year-olds and adults less so than the 11-year-olds), (2) arbitrarily placed picture sequences led to a greater number of markers of increasing referent givenness than ordered sequences (which made it easier to put the information into story format), and (3) speakers were more inclined to tell the story when the frames were shown all at once (on the same page) than when they were presented in booklet format (one frame per page). The manipulation of the production conditions turned out to be an effective way of revealing speaker competence. In step-by-step encoding where the pictures were discovered one at a time, 7-year-old children exhibited a greater tendency to describe each frame as an independent entity, 11-year-old children always marked increasing referent givenness, and adults maintained coreference in a more flexible manner by varying the markers used to express referent givenness. The viewing of all frames at once before encoding provided support for the expression of emerging narrative skills. This condition enabled the 7-year-olds to no longer describe the pictures independently, promoted the marking of increasing referent givenness between the ages of 7 and 9, and pointed out the age (9 years) when the speakers began to mark coreference as a function of how the story ended.